This blog discusses the historical reliability of the Bible, the creation/evolution debate and apologetics in general.

Sunday, 28 October 2007

Water, water everywhere .... but what about life?

They didn't need this on Mars

Joel Kontinen

In our "just add water" culture we often think that if there's water, there's life. Time and again this old evolutionist mantra finds its way into the news headlines. Whether it is the discovery of a new rocky "super Earth" such as Gliese 581 c found last spring [1] or something much nearer, the response is often more or less the same. Ten years ago, when the media spread the news that water had been found on Mars, Dr. Ross Humphreys wrote that he was delighted. He explained:

The first reason for my delight is that it helps people imagine the Genesis flood. After all, if a planet which is presently dryer than the Gobi desert could once have been covered with water, then how much more possible would such a deluge be for the Earth—whose surface is three-quarters covered with water two miles deep?[2]

He went on to say,

The second reason is that it supports the Bible’s implication of a water origin for all things [Genesis 1:2, 6-10; 2 Peter 3:5]. Water (often as ice) is everywhere in the solar system: in comets, planetary rings, on moons of the large planets, possibly on the asteroid Ceres and at the poles of the Earth’s moon, formerly on Venus [Science News, ‘Venus: The Waters of Yesteryear’, 120:372-373, Dec. 12, 1981], presently on Earth and deep in its rocky mantle, and in the polar caps of Mars. Water, as falling chunks of ice, may have pounded out many of the craters we see everywhere in the solar system. God asks, ‘…have you seen the storehouses of the hail, which I have reserved for the time of distress …?’ (Job 38:22, 23, NAS). [3]

What does the hype about water on a "super-Earth" or Mars really tell us? As life cannot form spontaneously from non-life in water because of hydrolysis, have they at last found a new magic formula for abiogenesis?

A plausible tip: no. Magic should not be confused with science. Life only comes from life. It needs both information and an intelligent Sender, as information expert Dr. Werner Gitt explains. [4]

Nothing will not produce everything by chance over millions of years. Any number of monkeys banging a keyboard at random will not produce an intelligent message, even if one allows them a few millions of years to do so.